As the communications world transforms, demand for bandwidth and high-quality multimedia services is escalating. Residential and business customers have rising expectations for various types of data and communications at ever increasing speeds. Ultimately, this shift in expectations challenges service providers to provide diverse, bandwidth-intensive services required by customers. The underlying network architecture must therefore be highly reliable, manageable, and scalable.
Modern telecommunications networks typically include various network elements (NEs) that are interconnected using electrical and/or optical data transmission lines. One such NE is an optical-transport switch. An optical-transport switch is typically made up of one or more confederated shelves with each shelf having multiple ingress and egress endpoints. Although each shelf is designed to be non-blocking, meaning that a data signal from any ingress endpoint of the shelf may be routed to any egress endpoint of the shelf, bandwidth constraints between shelves may often result in disconnectivity between an ingress endpoint of one shelf and an egress endpoint of another shelf.
Assuring the lack of disconnectivity within a NE, such as blocking, may be difficult and costly in terms of increased hardware and configuration efforts. Although various approaches have been effected, including approaches by the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Common Control and Measurement Plane working group (CCAMP), and the IETF wavelength switched optical networks (WSON) standardization effort within CCAMP, all currently effected approaches lack the ability to hierarchically classify resources by behavior traits, unnecessarily divide the NE for connectivity purposes, or tend to prune a NE as not having a viable intra-network element (intra-NE) path while a viable intra-NE path actually exits.
The subject matter claimed herein is not limited to embodiments that solve any disadvantages or that operate only in environments such as those described above. Rather, this background is only provided to illustrate one example technology area where some embodiments described herein may be practiced.